In the U.S. in 1948, quoting my colleague Walter Williams, “the unemployment rate for white 16-17 year olds was 10.2 percent while that for blacks was 9.4 percent. Among white 18-19 year-olds, unemployment was 9.4 percent and for blacks it was 10.5 percent.” Today (October 2013) the unemployment rate for white 16-19 year olds is 19.4%; the unemployment rate for black 16-19 year olds is 36.0% – nearly double the rate of white teenage unemployment. (In 2006 – the year before the current recession began – the unemployment rate for white 16-19 year olds was 13.2%; the unemployment rate for black 16-19 years olds was 29.0% – slightly more than double the rate of white teenage unemployment.)

That is, the unemployment rate of black teenagers in 1948 was comparable to that of white teenagers, and about 2.5 times higher than the overall unemployment rate of 3.8%. Today, the unemployment rate for black teenagers is much higher than that for white teenagers, and nearly 5 times higher than the overall unemployment rate of 7.3%. (In 2006, the year before the current recession began, the unemployment rate for black teenagers was 6.3 times higher than the overall unemployment rate of 4.6%.)

How do you explain these data? Are American employers more prejudiced in 2013 than in 1948 against teenagers? More importantly, are Americans more racist in 2013 than they were in 1948?

These facts about teenage unemployment are straightforwardly explained by the standard economic theory that predicts that a legislated minimum wage causes the lowest-skilled, most poorly educated, or otherwise least-desirable workers to be the first to be fired and the last to be hired. What is your alternative explanation?

“new evidence based on methods that let the data identify the appropriate control groups leads to stronger evidence of disemployment effects, with teen employment elasticities near −0.3. We conclude that the evidence still shows that minimum wages pose a tradeoff of higher wages for some against job losses for others, and that policymakers need to bear this tradeoff in mind when making decisions about increasing the minimum wage.” — David Neumark, J.M. Ian Salas, William Wascher, via Greg Mankiw

“Which is just to say that in a diverse nation with more than 300 million citizens, opinions are going to vary on the pros and cons of extended business hours. How strapped for cash are you? Where does your family live? What’s your relationship with them like? How sentimental are you about specific holiday rituals? People will differ. This Thanksgiving there are going to be people with jobs at the Gap who wish they weren’t working Thanksgiving but feel that they’d lose their jobs if they weren’t willing to take an extra shift. There are also going to be people with jobs at Radio Shack who wish they could earn some extra cash and get out from under that credit card debt. I’m not persuaded that there’s a first-order question of social justice here one way or the other.” — Matthew Yglesias

“A few years back, Robert Ohsfeldt of Texas A&M and John Schneider of the University of Iowa asked the obvious question: what happens if you remove deaths from fatal injuries from the life expectancy tables? Among the 29 members of the OECD, the U.S. vaults from 19th place to…you guessed it…first. Japan, on the same adjustment, drops from first to ninth.” — Forbes Magazine Commentary

“Teachers in the United States are compensated largely on the basis of fixed schedules that reward experience and credentials. However, there is a growing interest in whether performance-based incentives based on rigorous teacher evaluations can improve teacher retention and performance. The evidence available to date has been mixed at best. This study presents novel evidence on this topic based on IMPACT, the controversial teacher-evaluation system introduced in the District of Columbia Public Schools by then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee. IMPACT implemented uniquely high-powered incentives linked to multiple measures of teacher performance (i.e., several structured observational measures as well as test performance). We present regression-discontinuity (RD) estimates that compare the retention and performance outcomes among low-performing teachers whose ratings placed them near the threshold that implied a strong dismissal threat. We also compare outcomes among high-performing teachers whose rating placed them near a threshold that implied an unusually large financial incentive. Our RD results indicate that dismissal threats increased the voluntary attrition of low-performing teachers by 11 percentage points (i.e., more than 50 percent) and improved the performance of teachers who remained by 0.27 of a teacher-level standard deviation. We also find evidence that financial incentives further improved the performance of high-performing teachers (effect size = 0.24). – new NBER Working Paper, Thomas Dee and James Wyckoff

“We exploit a policy discontinuity at U.S. state borders to identify the effects of unemployment insurance policies on unemployment. Our estimates imply that most of the persistent increase in unemployment during the Great Recession can be accounted for by the unprecedented extensions of unemployment benefit eligibility. In contrast to the existing recent literature that mainly focused on estimating the effects of benefit duration on job search and acceptance strategies of the unemployed — the micro effect — we focus on measuring the general equilibrium macro effect that operates primarily through the response of job creation to unemployment benefit extensions. We find that it is the latter effect that is very important quantitatively”. — new NBER paper

“The influence of the California Teachers Association was rarely more apparent – or more sickening – than in the defeat of SB1530. The union showed its willingness to defend an expensive and cumbersome process for firing bad teachers at almost any cost – even if that means school districts must continue to spend exorbitant sums of time and money to dismiss teachers in cases involving sex, drugs or violence with students.” –SF Gate, on the teachers union recent campaign effort against SB1530

“It’s not just bathroom tissue that’s lacking: In recent months, food items such as cooking oil and powdered milk have nearly disappeared from store shelves. But even after a decade of price controls, foreign-exchange restrictions, runaway inflation, currency devaluations, blackouts and takeovers of more than 1,000 companies or their assets, the government still claims the private sector is at fault for the deficiency in consumer staples. The Manpa asset grab came a week after Maduro introduced the new regulatory committee, which will address product hoarding and other abuses that he blames for missing goods.” — Bloomberg, on toilet paper shortages in Venezuela

They say that “[a] tipping point was reached in 2012, when average manufacturing costs in Mexico, adjusted for productivity, dropped below those of China.” In other words, rising real wages for Chinese manufacturing workers mean that unit labor costs in Mexico are now just as low. Meanwhile, thanks to NAFTA and geography, it’s much cheaper to export American natural gas to Mexico than to ship it to Asia through LNG ports. So right now “electricity costs are around 4 percent lower in Mexico than in China, for example, while the average price of industrial natural gas is 63 percent lower.” Add to that the fact that Mexico has an advantageous location in terms of shipping products to American and Canadian consumers and the logic looks pretty compelling—Mexico is going to be the factory location of choice for many companies.

“The Treasury Department announced earlier today that it’s ready to sell the 18 percent of General Motors that it still owns, which is going to leave the auto bailout as a large net loser for the government unless shares suddenly skyrocket up to almost $54 a share. By contrast, the bank bailout portion of TARP has turned a profit.” — Matthew Yglesias

“One of the Obama arguments at the time was that the rush in the stimulus program was needed to avoid a Great Depression. This was and is highly doubtful (though, yes, it is widely accepted). The US economic emergency in late 2008 and early 2009 wasn’t really an aggregate demand crisis but a financial crisis. The chaotic failure of Lehman Brothers had led to an intense panic and credit squeeze. The Fed therefore needed to flood the markets with liquidity, which it rightly did, in order to unwind the panic. The Fed’s action was the real difference with 1933 (when the Fed allowed the banks to fail). It was the Fed, not the fiscal stimulus, which prevented a fall into depression.” — Jeffrey Sachs, Responding to Paul Krugman and Crude Keynesianism

“Ironically, the minimum wage creates a reserve army of the unemployed. That in turn allows employers to be less thoughtful, helpful, and kind. It destroys the civilizing effect of competition by muting it. That encourages exploitation. It reduces the cost to employers of racism or cruelty. Before the increase, being obnoxious or racist made it much harder to find employees. A minimum wage makes it easier to indulge in bad behavior. The costs are lower. Before the minimum wage, a cruel, selfish employer might have had to mentor his employees or train them or be nice to them despite his nature. Now he won’t have to. He can still get workers to work for him. Even more cruelly, the minimum wage encourages workers to exploit themselves. They work harder and put up with more abuse from the boss because the minimum wage reduces the alternatives that are available.” — Economist Russ Roberts

“I’d even argue that people’s views about climate change are extremely inconsistent. (#2) If you believe that lower demand for fossil fuels in in clean countries will reduce fossil fuel prices in dirty countries, why aren’t First World greens worried that reducing their carbon footprint will counter-productively increase carbon emissions in the Third World?” — Bryan Caplan

I have a long standing rule to NEVER EVER give money to bums. No matter what the circumstances. I even look down on people who do. They rub me as purely emotional acts with not even one second of real thought. I do this for two reasons: one experience, the other logical. Growing up in Compton, I was approached by what we called cluck-heads daily. Crack addicts who would do anything, and I mean anything, for a $1. They would give you the most extravagant reason why that dollar was absolutely necessary. Then, after a moment of weakness, you would see them smoking that dollar – digging themselves further into the crack addiction. After years and years of this, I have developed quite a thick skin from beggars.

The logical reason has to do with the fact that it is very difficult to separate the true needy beggar from the scammer. When confronted for a donation, with such limited information, there really is no statistically significant way to know if the bum is going to use the donation for something useful, or simply another hit of drugs. Much more beneficial is to save the donation and send it to a charity devoted to helping the truly needy. They have the means of separating the sincere bum ready to change their life, from the one who just wants another hit. With such noisy information, it’s much more logical to withhold your money and choose an efficient charity of your choice.

With that said, I was touched by the news article showing a New York Police officer giving a pair of winter boots to a shoeless bum. I thought, maybe in that situation that is the best thing to do, as the bum currently needs shoes, else his feet will freeze. It’s an immediate, obvious need that should be fulfilled. Sending money to a charity is not going to cut it, as by then the bum could have lost his feet to frost bite. Anyway, I didn’t think much more of it until later when I saw the story on CNN.

While reading the article, still torn between feelings of admiration and disapproval, I came across this interesting section:

There were some who considered the officer a victim, taken in by another scam.

“This guy is only barefoot as a begging strategy,” wrote David Levy. “I’ve been seeing him around midtown for years. I’ve even witnessed someone buy him slippers in a freezing day which he promptly put in his shopping cart.”

“Clever stunt! The (man) is ‘parked’ at the entrance of a shoe shop. He got like 10 pairs that day,” commented Louis Zehmke.

Proposition 209 banned using racial preferences in admissions at California’s public colleges. We analyze unique data for all applicants and enrollees within the University of California (UC) system before and after Prop 209. After Prop 209, graduation rates of minorities increased by 4.4%. We characterize conditions required for better matching of students to campuses to account for this increase. We find that Prop 209 did improve matching and this improvement was important for the graduation gains experienced by less-prepared students. At the same time, better matching only explains about 20% of the overall graduation rate increase. Changes after Prop 209 in the selectivity of enrolled students explains 34-50% of the increase. Finally, it appears UC campuses responded to Prop 209 by doing more to help retain and graduate its students, which explains between 30-46% of the post-Prop 209 improvement in the graduation rate of minorities.

If Wal-Mart started to pay high wages, Wal-Mart jobs would become attractive to skilled workers. People who currently work as medical assistants or car mechanics would want Wal-Mart jobs. Since they are more productive and have more skills – since their labor is worth more – they will outcompete the kind of people who currently work at Wal-Mart. So, raising wages above market levels is unlikely to help unskilled workers. Instead, it causes job gentrification. (Imagine if Wal-Mart offered to pay its workers $100/hr. Then many of my colleagues would consider becoming Wal-Mart cashiers).